The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Recently, the Japanese cabinet, in
announcing plans to purchase 28 additional U.S. F-35
fighters (in addition to 42 already contracted), affirmed a policy of
maintaining Japanese air superiority over the PRC.

The F-35 may indeed contribute to Japanese air superiority in unexpected and, to the United States, undesirable ways.

I found it interesting that the Abe administration
has gone all-in on the F-35, a U.S. “jack of all trades and master of none”
fifth generation (stealth) multi-purpose warplane that gets no love from the
zoom-and-boom crowd, and has apparently reconciled itself to not buying any
F-22 Raptors.

The F-35’s development history (and
cost and schedule overrun statistics) makes for sobering reading. The US fleet of 2400 planes will cost $400
billion to develop and build—and another $1.1 trillion to operate over its
projected 50 year life. It remains to be seen if the plane is remembered as a monument of sustained US pre-eminence--or a Great Wall of China-style tombstone for an empire-ending megaboondoggle.

The Raptor, despite its own mind-boggling
cost (given the vagaries of military accounting and the small number of planes
produced to amortize the program’s fixed costs, all one can say is “north of
$300 million per copy"), its horrendous flight availability stats, and some
nagging and deadly issues relating to its oxygen system, is still the only
genuine, flying 5th generation stealth air superiority fighter,
albeit untested in combat. As such, it
figures prominently in the manhood-measuring contests contemplated by various
governments that face potentially hostile and relatively well-equipped air
antagonists at their borders.

Israel has lusted after the F-22
Raptor; so has Japan. And the U.S.
Department of Defense brass has yearned
to sell the Raptor, in order to further defray its costs and make the plane
more affordable for the U.S. military.

However, the Obey Amendment, named
after a Wisconsin congressman, which forbids export of the Raptor in order to
keep its superior technology out of hostile hands, has become a perennial in
the Defense Appropriations bill. The
civilian defense leadership under DoD Secretary Gates discouraged talk of
repealing the Obey Amendment to provide an export tailwind to the program, and consigned the Raptor to niche status in 2009 by capping its build at 187
units.

One of the reasons that Gates asked
for the resignation of Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne in 2008 was that Wynne
didn’t back off on his insistence that 381 Raptors were needed. And apparently somebody was egging on the
Japanese with assurances that the manufacturing procedures for the plane had been exhaustively
documented and the tooling and technology carefully preserved, so that the
production line could be restarted for a qualified buyer like Japan for the
bargain price of somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion dollars.

But with the Raptor option foreclosed, Japan opted for 42 F-35s in 2011.

The U.S. Raptor policy, as far as I can
tell, has never been authoritatively explained.

The most likely reason is that
Secretary Gates wanted the US services and foreign buyers to put their oars in
the water on behalf of the F-35 and not cling to hope that they would finally
get Raptors instead.

The official reason for the export
ban is that the US is loath to engage in coproduction with sophisticated
potential buyers and thereby risk the leakage of the precious technology to “competitors”
like China.

This might be a genuine concern with
respect to Israel, which has shown a dismaying tendency to pass on US
technology to PRC in the course of its arms sales, but it would seem that Japan
would be an unlikely practitioner of such monkey business. In fact, Japan might be better at protecting
sensitive military technology from the PRC than the United States.

Perhaps the reason for the export
ban is the United States wants to maintain a monopoly on the ultimate air
superiority fighter. The Raptor gives
the U.S. a trump card in East Asia; 12 Raptors rotate in and out of Kadena on
Okinawa, giving the US a persuasive security role while denying the need for
Japan to operate its own squadron.

However, the Fifth Generation
Fighter monopoly shows signs of eroding, as China fields two stealth aircraft,
including the J-20 stealth fighter, and India proceeds with its pricy joint
development agreement with Russia for the Sukhoi T-50.

Japan, as one might expect, has its
doubts about matching these sexy air-to-air fighters with the F-35, by
comparison the Canyonero of 5th generation warbirds. And, as one might also expect, it has not
taken the Raptor export ban laying down.

Japan has its own 5th
generation fighter program en ovo,
the ATD-X, which has been prototyped by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. If the Japanese government pulls the trigger
for development and serial production, the plane will be called the F-3.

One possible reason to deny the
Raptor to Japan is that technology leakage would indeed occur, but toward
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Ishikawa Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi
Electronics instead of China.

But Japan can probably get the
advanced technology it wants through the F-35 program anyway.

An interesting discussion by an JSDF
reservist studying in Australia made the case in 2012:

For Japan, the F-35
delivers more than a fighter capable of facing off head-to-head with the
latest Chinese and Russian-made adversaries. It also provides access to stealth
and other next-generation (NGEN) capabilities that Japan’s defense contractors
need to advance development of their own NGEN fighter.

…

There is little doubt that buying the F-35 will help close
the gap between Japan’s R&D program and established NGEN fighter programs
abroad. With time, Japan’s skilled workforce and manufacturing capabilities
probably are sufficient to overcome the rest.

Actually, make that “no doubt”. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which has
airframe responsibilities for the ATD-X, IHI, and Mitsubishi Electric have been
tasked by the Japanese government to locally source 10% of the components in
Japan’s F-35 :

The very likely inclusion of MHI in the project raises the possibility that
the F-35s that Japan will purchase may cost 2 times more than an off-the-shelf
unit will. Clearly, considerations relating to the development of Japan’s own
military industrial base are driving the policy decisions in this particular
case, more than perhaps any appreciated need for a large number of F-35As
themselves.Technological insights gained from the manufacture of
components related to low-observability
will go into Mitsubishi Heavy Industry’s ongoing ATD-X ”F-3″
development (the technology demonstrator scheduled to be tested in 2014), which
raises the possibility for an indigenous Japanese fighter to be deployed in the
late 2020s to replace the Mitsubishi F-2s and F-15Js. Not only is MHI also in
the process of constructing its own technology demonstrator, but IHI reportedly has its own plans to develop a
technology-demonstrator engine capable of generating 15 metric tons of thrust –
two of which could easily power an airframe worthy of replacing the F-15Js. The
linkage between these plans, and the F-35 manufacture, is quite clear. It would
also seem to fit broadly within the plans of the MOD, and Japanese defense
industry, identified by Bradley Perret at Aviation Week, to lay the groundwork for the acquisition of
technologies from domestic and international sources that would be necessary
for an indigenous Japanese fighter to be assembled, if necessary.Perhaps as likely (if not more likely), these technologies, plus the
industrial “threat” of Japan developing its own indigenous fighter, could be
used as leverage/justification for gaining a greater participating share in any
future cross-national development/manufacturing project. Japan’s F-XX
fighter procurement will in a few years start to garner greater attention…

I like the quotes around “threat”. It's interesting to consider if current US strategy considers the "informal" Japanese acquisition of US stealth technology a desirable state of affairs.

So, if the F-35
Japan program goes ahead—and there is apparently no serious question that it will—and the US
does not rethink its Raptor export ban, expect Japan to be ready to enter the 5th
generation fighter game with the F-3.

The other interesting consequence of
the stealth fighter game calls into question the reassuring idea that Japan will use its mastery of 5th generation technology simply as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the US.

In the high end segment of the defense game, economics apparently dictate exports, so that
the gigantic costs can be spread over a reasonable number of units, as the
United States is trying to do with the F-35 by laying off a few billion dollars
in development costs to allies who will presumably have no choice but to double
down and purchase a few hundred of the planes.

Japan will face the similar conditions. In order to be a credible player, exports will be central to any indigenous fighter program, as the Japanese analyst remarked:

The reality is that producing competitive NGEN fighters
probably requires far more funding than Japanese policymakers forecast.

As a result, Japan will need to mirror the approaches used
by other NGEN producers, including offsetting development costs with foreign
exports. This is the only realistic business model which proves politically and
economically viable for building a true NGEN fighter. Since Japan’s current
laws prohibit the export of such a fighter, Tokyo therefore needs to relax or
rewrite its export control restrictions. Japan’s recent moves in this direction
increase the likelihood that the domestic legal barriers to exports will
eventually disappear.

And that in turn means that
restrictions limiting co-development will probably be honored “in the breach”
more and more; indeed, the economic demands of Japanese defense “reconstruction”
will probably dictate that the limits on plain-vanilla arms sales be jettisoned
as well.

At the defense and security meeting,
the government also traversed the thorny issue of lifting its long-standing
weapons export ban, with Shinichi Kitaoka, head of the government panel
launched by Abe, stating that the ban should be lifted.

Kitaoka is a former Japanese
ambassador to the United Nations and has, of late, served as a key adviser to
Abe and is a proponent of reinterpreting Japan's war-renouncing, pacifist
Constitution to lift the self-imposed ban on the right to exercise collective
self-defense, and as the deputy chairman of Abe's Advisory Panel on
Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security, also wishes to see the embargo
on weapons exports lifted.

Believe it or not, the export limitations are
already dead as a doornail for F-35 components; Prime Minister Abe is already
pitching Japanese sourcing for F-35 parts to NATO.

The Abe administration never doubted that the parts for the
F-35 would be excluded from the weapons export ban. In compiling the new
statement explaining the exception, the administration came up with a new basic
concept of "complying with the United Nations Charter."

The export of Japanese-made parts will be allowed only to
those nations that abide by the objectives and principles of the U.N. Charter.

If the
international environment is favorable--i.e. places like Indonesia and
Malaysia are interested in a Japanese fighter with no strings attached
(and amazingly, Taiwan is also bruited about as a market for an
indigenous Japanese fighter), the Japanese government might decide to go
whole hog on the program.

So US military planners are
presented with an interesting dilemma.

The United States has no defensible
reason to deny Japan co-production on the F-35.

Which means that in a few years the
US will probably be faced with a situation in which Japan 1) has developed a
viable alternative to the Raptor and 2) has established itself as an
unrestricted exporter of military goods and 3) has a vested economic and
strategic interest in exporting the plane in competition with the United
States, and at the expense of reduced US military and strategic predominance…

Saturday, December 28, 2013

With RSA, a big and respected name (actually initials) in cryptography, currently getting flayed in the public press for taking $10 million from the NSA and, in return, embedding a dodgy, NSA-compromised random number generator a.k.a. DUAL EC EBRG in its products (RNGs help generate encryption keys; a compromised RNG yields a limited, more crackable set of keys), a few observations:

First, as is probably recalled, the compromised character of the NSA RNG was revealed in a previous tranche of the Snowden documents in September, and an embarrassed RSA quickly issued a recommendation that users cease using that particular RNG.

Second, even back in October, there were rumblings about possible financial considerations playing a part in RSA's willingness to include the RNG in its products. Here's a snip from a piece I wrote at the time:

[On a recent episode of Science Friday] Ira Flatow asked Philip Zimmerman [creator of the PGP open-key e-mail encryption system] why RSA would have done such a
thing. There was a long, awkward silence and some awkward laughter
before Zimmerman slid into the passive voice/third person zone:

ZIMMERMAN: And yet RSA did a security - did use it as their default
random number generator. And they do have competent cryptographers
working there. So.

FLATOW: How do you explain that?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, I'm not going to - I think I'd rather not be the one to say.

Maybe Mr. Zimmerman had an advance peek at the relevant Snowden documents. I think it more likely that he had already heard some tittle-tattle in his high tech circles but was not interested in calling down a corporate and legal sh*train upon himself by openly accusing the RSA of taking government money (interesting legal question: is it slanderous to allege that a US corporation engaged in a legal transaction with the US government?).

No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.

"The
labs group had played a very intricate role at BSafe [the product line that was compromised by the RNG], and they were
basically gone," said labs veteran Michael Wenocur, who left in 1999.

Actually, outside security analyst Bruce Schneier and others had raised serious concerns about DUAL EC EBRG in 2007 in a public forum and, as Zimmerman pointed out, RSA had competent cryptographers in the building. DUAL EC EBRG was provided as only one option, albeit the default, and security-savvy users would be able to select another, better RNG. And RSA cryptographers could further console themselves with the awareness that, even if Clueless Enduser kept DUAL EC EBRG as a default, probably the only entity with the message collection and analysis capability to exploit it effectively was America's own NSA.

In other words, it wasn't just RSA Chief Executive and Designated Villain Art Coviello sneaking down into the lab and inserting the lethal code while the techies obliviously shipped the compromised product.

Fourth, I think there is a growing awareness that a significant element of the Snowden story is the collusion between Big Tech and the NSA, fueled by the awareness that both sides want the same thing: a thoroughly backdoored Internet open to individual data profiling and surveillance penetration (and tolerate the resultant security breaches as cost of doing business/collateral damage).

I wonder if the story will get any more traction, since there are sizable vested economic, political, and ideological interests extending all the way to the Oval Office that are engaged in perpetuating the image of a benign, democratic/populist information order dedicated to information security. The constituency interested in seeing Google and the other tech giants share the blame for ruining the Internet--and in the process evaporating a few hundred billion dollars of personal wealth, market cap, and stock options--is, on the other hand, powerless and vanishingly small.

Inside the tech industry, the attitude seems to be one of damage control i.e. media initiatives to convince the public that the Internet companies care about YOU and hate helping out that nasty old government. As to the question of whether a corporate Snowden will emerge, the attitude seems to be, as Phil Zimmerman--a genuine and battered hero of the encryption wars in the 1990s--put it: "I think I'd rather not be the one to say." Maybe the code of omerta lives on in the tech industry.

Fifth, I find it amusing and somewhat irritating that, ever since I wrote about RSA in October, I am bombarded with RSA pop-up ads on my own blog and across the web. It's the Internet equivalent of a golden retriever that pursues me down the street driven by the irresistible urge to sniff the seat of my trousers. Make it stop!

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Myth: Shinzo Abe is a leading member of the team of world
and Asian democracies standing up to China in the name of universal values like
“freedom of navigation” and to help ensure the shared peace and prosperity of
Asia.

Reality:Shinzo Abe
is a revisionist nationalist using friction with China to pursue Japanese
national interests, put Japan on the right side of a zero-sum economic equation
opposite the PRC, maximize Japan’s independence of action as a regional hegemon,
hopefully peacefully, but if not...

Mission for the Western media:Manage the cognitive dissonance between comforting
myth and disturbing reality for the sake of its faithful readers.

First of all, please note that Yasukuni is not Japan’s
Arlington Cemetery.The role of national
repository of Japan’s war dead is filled by the Chidorigafuchi National
Cemetery.

Yasukuni is a right wing revisionist theme park that
provides sinecures for politicians of Abe’s LDP party on its board. It's too creepily ultranationalist even for the Japanese emperor himself to visit.

Jeffrey Kingston of Temple University’s Japan Center
provided a nice takedown of the Yasukuni myth back in August 2013 for
Bloomberg:

Yasukuni is ground zero for an
unrepentant view of Japan’s wartime aggression. During World War II, the shrine
served as the “command headquarters” of State Shinto, a religion that deified
the emperor and mobilized Japanese subjects to fight a holy war at his behest.
The private foundation that runs Yasukuni only added the 14 most controversial
“souls” [Class A war criminals—ed.] -- surreptitiously -- in 1978.

The shrine’s political mission is on
blatant display at the adjacent Yushukan museum, run by the same foundation.
There, the Class A war criminals are portrayed as martyrs. Japan’s war in China is supposed to have
suppressed banditry and terrorism, while its invasion of the rest of Asia is
represented as a war of liberation from Western colonialism…

…

It is telling that Emperor Showa
(Hirohito), once the head priest of State Shinto, confided to an aide that he
stopped visiting Yasukuni after 1978 precisely because the shrine had been
tainted by the presence of the Class A war criminals. This explicit
politicization of the site also explains why his son, current Emperor Akihito,
has maintained the imperial household’s embargo on visits.

Abe’s historical revisionism about World War II, as
represented by his Yasukuni visit, is not a generous if misguided exercise in greatest
generation nostalgia meant to soothe toothless, aging nationalists with a last
glimpse of imperial twilight.Historical
revisionism has an unmistakable contemporary resonance and drives a current
political agenda.For instance, it underpins
Abe’s burgeoning security relationships with India and Myanmar, both of whom
were unhappy British subjects not at all immune to the decolonization
blandishments of Imperial Japan in the 1940s.

The only foreigner commemorated at Yasukuni (with a stele)
is Radha Binod Pal, an Indian jurist and decolonization enthusiast, whose suppressed
dissent to the Tokyo war crimes tribunal verdict has become a sacred text for
Japanese historical revisionists, and was approvingly cited by Manmohan Singh
in his high-profile anti-Chinese bromance with Shinzo Abe.I refer interested readers to my article in
Japan Focus, which covers Abe’s celebration of Pal and the anti-colonial (as well
as anti-Chinese) foundation of current Indo-Japanese relations in convincing
detail.

As for Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father and national hero Aung
San did a lot more than flirt with the role of collaborator with the Japanese
occupation of Burma.He was in charge of
anti-British guerilla ops on behalf of the Japanese government, served as War
Minister in the occupation cabinet, and was personally awarded the Order of the
Rising Sun by Emperor Hirohito before he came to his liberal democratic senses
(or realized that Japanese rule was headed for collapse) and became leader of
the resistance.

The Japanese presence in Burma is remembered nostalgically
by a lot of Japanese and apparently more than a few Burmese locals and
sustained a flood of Japanese veteran tourism and government and private aid
projects since the 1950s.Japan cultivated
a special relationship with Myanmar even during the worst junta years, and Abe
has taken advantage of Myanmar’s opening to the West to jump in diplomatically
and commercially and work to displace Chinese influence.

And of course Abe himself came from a long line of
conservative politicians, most notoriously on his wife’s side Nobusuke Kishi,
who played a key role in the occupation of Manchuko, served in the Tojo cabinet
during World War II, and was detained as a candidate for Class A War Criminal
status until his release in 1948.

The most awkward and significant reality of Shinzo Abe’s
Yasukuni visit is that the villain at the heart of Japanese historical
revisionism is not China; it is the United States.

The core of Abe’s historical revisionism is not just that
the bandit-infested territories of China and Korea demanded Japanese tutelage
in the 1930s and 1940s, but also that the Japanese Empire was leading the fight
of the oppressed peoples of Asia against British colonialism and American
imperialism—in other words, the real war crime of World War II was U.S.
aggression against Japan.

The United States, and its pretensions to moral superiority
over Japan, as well as China and Korea’s presumptuous claims to virtuous victimhood,
were a target of Abe’s Yasukuni visit.

As I have pointed out before, the Chinese state media
frequently emphasizes the shared PRC-US interest of maintaining the official
World War II narrative of “evil Japan”, not only for the transitory Chinese
pleasure of guilt-tripping Tokyo, but because the US self-assigned role of
Asian lawgiver and restraint on Japanese militarism is one of the main
justifications for “pivoting” into Asia instead of just giving Japan enough
guns, bombs, and backing to manage the China containment show on its own.

Remember, Premier Wen Jiabao used his last official trip to
Europe to go to Potsdam, of all places, to celebrate the Potsdam Declaration,
the 1945 call by the US, Britain, and China for Japan’s unconditional surrender
and specifying occupation until Japan had a “peacefully inclined” government.

This context provides considerable heartburn for purveyors
of the “Abe as unwilling warrior” myth that presents Japan’s newly aggressive
foreign policy as a reaction to the “China threat” to national security, and
for that matter, the rather ridiculous assertion that Abe is a regretful victim
being pushed into visiting Yasukuni in order to appease his fireeating right
wing base.Abe pretty much is the base.

On the other hand, it provides considerable support for an
understanding of the Abe reality:that
Shinzo Abe is deliberately and carefully stirring the China pot in order to exacerbate
and highlight the polarization between China and Japan to justify his ongoing
reconfiguration of Japan’s regional role into independent local hegemon at the
expense of U.S. prestige and power in Asia.

Abe manufactured a crisis out of the Chinese declaration of
its Air Defense Identification Zone; now he exploits and prolongs the furor by
sticking a finger in China’s eye with the Yasukuni visit.In other words, instead of trending toward
stability (and making things easier for the United States), Abe is escalating,
enhancing instability (and making things more difficult for the US).Strange behavior for an ally.Understandable actions for a regional actor
impatient to assert its independence vis a vis the US.

Abe is a man in a hurry.He realizes that the an intersection of LDP
hubris-driven corruption and incompetence and an an eventual resurgence of Japan’s other political
parties lies somewhere in his future.He
is determined to re-establish Japan as a full-fledged regional power before he
leaves office.Instability and tensions
with China work toward this end, and that’s why he does things like visit
Yasukuni.

This state of affairs is perfectly understood by the PRC
government, and Chinese state media has been harping on Abe’s incremental security
reforms and his efforts to develop a regional network of Japan-centric
alliances, even before he takes the momentous step of revising the pacifist
constitution and enabling formal “collective security” treaties that would
permit a Japanese military response if an ally, and not Japan itself, were threatened.

It is also, I think, well understood by the U.S. government,
which has been performing an increasingly difficult balancing act as Japan
sails off on its own independent regional security policy.For the sake of its own “pivot” agenda, which
is built on the idea of China containment, the United States has denied itself
the “honest broker” role in a balance of power network and is instead trying to
herd cats (and a Japanese panther) to maintain an anti-China picket line.

As the Japanese government understands (and, I would hope,
U.S. diplomats now sincerely regret), the pivot doctrine has fatally
circumscribed US ability to push back on Japan (unless Japan does something
absolutely crazy illegal and aggressive, which is not Mr. Abe’s MO).Prime Minister Abe knows he can go to
Yasukuni and elicit nothing more than anxious squealing from the U.S. State
Department.

Western corporate media outlets, I believe, haven’t gotten
the memo since they have totally tongue-kissed, climbed into bed, and had
blissful liberal democratic sex with the valorized dream of the world’s
democracies led by the United States working hand in glove with Japan to stand
up to the PRC’s authoritarian regime.The realization that the new Japanese policy is based on the idea that
the Pacific War was a gigantic regional war crime by the United States instead
of the first triumph of American democracy over Asian authoritarianism (and the
successful template for a certain current US effort against another alien,
pushy Asian power whose initials are “PRC”) simply doesn’t seem to sink in.

The result is utterly gormless reporting (sorry, Reuters) along the lines of :

Paying respects at the shrine is part of Abe's conservative agenda to
restore Japan's pride in its past and recast its wartime history with a less
apologetic tone. He also wants to ease the restraints of Japan's post-World War
Two pacifist constitution on the military.

…

Some political experts said Abe had
probably calculated that his relatively high voter ratings, based largely on
hopes for plans to revive the economy, could withstand any criticism over his
Yasukuni pilgrimage, which would also shore up support in his conservative
base.

He may also have felt that with ties
with Beijing and Seoul in a deep freeze, a visit would hardly make things
worse.

Given the conflicted (and self-inflicted) nature of US pivot
policy, I expect the big media reporting to continue to hew to the more-sorrow-than-in-anger
angle that “For some mysterious reason Abe is going out of his way to irritate PRC
jerks and why is he antagonizing South Korea at the same time even though South
Korea is a democracy too and since Japan is a democracy they should be buddies
oh never mind”, while continuing to ignore the most important reality: that
events in Asia are increasingly slipping away from the grasp of the United
States and into the hands of Japan—into the hands of Shinzo Abe, who is fundamentally
suspicious of U.S. pretensions to leadership and perhaps even questions US regional
legitimacy as anything more than a fading power still trying to trade on its
legacy of Japanese conquest more than half a century ago.